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SUBroutine?
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Sep 16, 2017 09:32
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Good point. Why does it need anything else.
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Sep 16, 2017 09:35
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Kelp Me! posted:also the Motorola Droid 4 was the single greatest slide-out-keyboard Android phone of all time by a wide margin I had a Motorola backflip and it was the biggest piece of poo poo.
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Sep 16, 2017 09:47
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sebmojo posted:I had a Motorola backflip and it was the biggest piece of poo poo. That review is like a time capsule with all the terrible early UI designs and subsidized phone prices.
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Sep 16, 2017 10:50
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yeah, that thing looks pretty sucky
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Sep 16, 2017 11:16
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Tunicate posted:No, you should check for the wall before standing - it's possible that there isn't space to stand up in the first place. It's sitting in a chair, possibly directly in front of the wall. The assumption being that if there's room for it's feet, there's room for it to stand.
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Sep 16, 2017 11:26
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Krispy Kareem posted:That review is like a time capsule with all the terrible early UI designs and subsidized phone prices. especially: "So you have AT&T Maps, a TeleNav-based replacement for Google Maps which does the same thing, but much more slowly and with a rougher interface. (Fortunately, you still get Google Maps.) AT&T Music is a pointless collection of links to other things on the phone. AT&T Radio is a tease for a $6.99/month streaming radio service. MobiTV is a streaming TV service that I could not make work. AT&T Wi-Fi Hotspots is a link to a Web-based hotspot finder. And the Where app is actually evil; just by entering the program, it opts you in to a pay service that you have to voluntarily opt out of. Never mind what it does." Remember the good old days of buying a new carrier subsidised phone and discovering which cool features they'd inexplicably removed or hobbled? Like my lovely Siemens S35i which had a programmable shortcut button. Except Virgin Mobile had permanently locked it as a shortcut for their WAP service, most of which didn't actually work.
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Sep 16, 2017 22:55
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Horace posted:especially: That text above might have well come from the current ATT website and their crazy add on services that people must be buying?
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Sep 16, 2017 23:13
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Was it AT&T maps that was a monthly fee or something else? I think around 2010-2012 one of the carriers was still trying to sell people a map service that was like a $10/month subscription. I got an iphone in 2010 when data plans first started to get cheap, but I only had like 200mb/month I think, and iphones didn't have navigation yet so I an offline navigation app that was like $20, and even by those standards $10/month for maps seemed insane. mystes has a new favorite as of 23:33 on Sep 16, 2017 |
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Sep 16, 2017 23:28
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[quote="“mystes”" post="“476466706”"] Was it AT&T maps that was a monthly fee or something else? I think around 2010-2012 one of the carriers was still trying to sell people a map service that was like a $10/month subscription. [/quote] I worked for verizon at the time and we definitely still had a $9.99 maps service. I tried selling it to a lady with a Nokia Shade because she only wanted something "to make calls and have maps." She wanted an unlimited data plan, though, because she wouldn't believe that her 480x360 monochrome screen phone wouldn't consume too much data without it. Otherwise, absolutely no one wanted it, and if they had it you knew that they'd been screwed by some rep.
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Sep 16, 2017 23:34
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Verizon and ATT still have their own maps services, and yes it's $6/mo for literally the same map/navigation source as the free Google/Apple maps that's installed directly next to it.
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Sep 16, 2017 23:45
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OLD synchronous motor starting up. The stator actually spins and is manually braked during startup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNuI6keQXYA quote:I get how it works - it's like the predecessor to modern soft start technology using mechanical means, letting the motor housing to rotate initially then gradual braking to get the housing to slow down, the magnetic field counter force starts the rotor spinning the opposite direction and the slow braking effect brings the load on gradually reducing inrush current, clever and simple, I love it And another: old 1600A DC circuit breaker teardown by Photonic Induction! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAhq_A4EbkE Three-Phase has a new favorite as of 02:14 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 02:11
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This rules. Old barrel organ playing "Smooth Criminal" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ6aDLpWON8
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Sep 17, 2017 02:31
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Earlier today I discovered that someone had uploaded the whole series of the 90s Are You Afraid of the Dark? horror anthology show to the Internet Archive so I've been rewatching some of the episodes I vaguely remembered. One of them is "The Tale of the Phone Police". While watching the episode I couldn't help but think how many of the plot points in it wouldn't make sense to younger people today. Firstly, the story starts with the our main character and his friend making prank calls. Even at the time the episode was made in 1994 prank calling as a pastime was already on its way out due to the adoption of Caller ID, *69, and screening your calls on your answering machine. Today it wouldn't make sense since almost nobody answers their phone if they don't recognize the number. Then, the big sister of the main character tells him and his friend they'll be arrested by the titular "phone police" if they keep making prank calls and mentions that it happened to a kid named Billy Baxter. The friend leaves and the main character takes the phone book back to his room to look up Billy Baxter and he finds a listing with only 6 digits  (instead of the usual 7). A kid today might know what a phone book was but even if they did they would probably be equally confused by a 7-digit number as they would by a 6-digit one since in the cell phone age you'll pretty much always need to specify the area code when you give out a phone number.Of course, the main character can't resist calling this strange number and he gets a staticy connection to an old man begging him for help. He freaks and hangs up, only to get called right back . Again, *69 or caller ID makes this horror implications of this plot point less understandable.The main character disconnects his phone and the next day explains what happened to his friend while they're out walking. His friend doesn't believe him but then they walk by a pay phone which rings and it's the same raspy old voice calling  . Of course, a young person today probably wouldn't fully get the horror implications of someone or something being able to call you wherever you were even when you weren't at home.This prompts them to visit the phone company (which is creatively called "The Phone Company") to find out what this number connects to and the secretary directs them to the "records department" in the basement. The friend decides to wait in the hallway while the main character enters, and of course it's actually the Phone Police and he's under arrest  . The friend leaves and goes back to the main character's house to get help from the main character's parents. When he gets there the main character's sister doesn't recognize him or remember having a brother, and when the friend tries to prove the brother existed by showing the sister the main character's bedroom he finds it's now a sewing room with no trace of the main character.As a kid, that last bit was the part of the episode I found the scariest. The concept that a mysterious secret force could just completely erase you from existence so that even your own family never knew you existed was terrifying and the phone company was the perfect entity to have wield this power. Back in the day, particularly in the pre-breakup "Ma Bell" era, they had the kind of power that was normally reserved for governments. If you wanted to talk to someone in real-time and you weren't together in person you had no choice but to use the phone company. If they disconnected you then you were screwed. Today you can get phone service not just with the "phone company" but also your cable company or 4 different cellular providers (or dozens of MVNOs), not to mention all the Internet-based phone and chat/messaging services. The story loses a bit of its punch in today's era of easy and cheap communication. Finally, the friend comes up with a plan to rescue the main character. He looks up the main character in the phonebook and finds that he has his own mysterious 6-digit number now (while making a comment that "they work fast"  to have gotten the new phone book out so quickly). He goes to the phone company and calls the main character on a payphone in the lobby. The main character lets it ring (as he and the friend had previously discussed as part of the escape plan) and the friend uses the loud ringer to locate where the phone police were holding the main character in the building. Of course, the concept of a phone just ringing without going to voicemail is pretty strange today.In the end they escape and reality reverts back to normal. Oh yeah, and the framing story has the tale being told via cell phone, and at the end they reveal that the character telling the story is calling them from her own cell phone. I can only imagine how expensive that would have been back in the day. 
Mr.Radar has a new favorite as of 05:17 on Sep 17, 2017 |
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Sep 17, 2017 05:10
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Horace posted:Remember the good old days of buying a new carrier subsidised phone and discovering which cool features they'd inexplicably removed or hobbled? Like my lovely Siemens S35i which had a programmable shortcut button. Except Virgin Mobile had permanently locked it as a shortcut for their WAP service, most of which didn't actually work. I got a Verizon Blackberry in 2008 and it had GPS turned off so you had to pay for Verizon Navigation I could read the forums and email on it but any kind of apps were a complete afterthought to it, even after putting in a microsd card.
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Sep 17, 2017 07:23
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Kelp Me! posted:also the Motorola Droid 4 was the single greatest slide-out-keyboard Android phone of all time by a wide margin Sidekick for life 
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Sep 17, 2017 07:34
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HTC Desire Z, from the days when HTC was the hottest company in the world when it came to smartphones. The build quality on this thing, especially the hinge mechanism, was incredible.
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Sep 17, 2017 11:09
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HTC legend was indestructible. They owned.
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Sep 17, 2017 11:10
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evobatman posted:HTC Desire Z, from the days when HTC was the hottest company in the world when it came to smartphones. The build quality on this thing, especially the hinge mechanism, was incredible. T-Mobile in the US released their own branded version of that called the T-Mobile G2 and I had one. It's like 5-6 years since I stopped using it and I still haven't owned a smartphone that's as good. 
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Sep 17, 2017 12:45
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Mr.Radar posted:As a kid, that last bit was the part of the episode I found the scariest. The concept that a mysterious secret force could just completely erase you from existence so that even your own family never knew you existed was terrifying and the phone company was the perfect entity to have wield this power. Back in the day, particularly in the pre-breakup "Ma Bell" era, they had the kind of power that was normally reserved for governments. If you wanted to talk to someone in real-time and you weren't together in person you had no choice but to use the phone company. If they disconnected you then you were screwed. Today you can get phone service not just with the "phone company" but also your cable company or 4 different cellular providers (or dozens of MVNOs), not to mention all the Internet-based phone and chat/messaging services. The story loses a bit of its punch in today's era of easy and cheap communication. I've been reading David Sedaris's Theft by Finding, which is 20 years of his diary entries and the sheer amount of power the phone company had over people's lives was astounding. Years of entries where he was perpetually $80 in arrears and getting his phone shut off, which would grind his life to a halt. I mean, it's that way now in that most people couldn't work or socialize without a mobile phone, but the power dynamics have shifted. I'm pretty sure I got to use a party line once. I can't remember many details, but it must have coincided in that brief period where my brain started developing permanent memories and my grandmother finally got a private line. Even a pre-school kid in the 1970's thought that poo poo was weird (you picked up the phone and people were already talking).
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Sep 17, 2017 13:20
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In the pre-Android smartphone days I actually had one of these monstrously sized phone/PDA hybrids HTC made, running Windows Mobile: The HTC Universal.   Or as it was called by Orange UK, the SPV M5000. It was common for HTC devices to be re-branded by the Carrier in the mid 2000s. The swivelling hinge was surprisingly durable, but battery life was mediocre as you'd expect from this brick of a phone. It had a 3.7 inch screen, Wi-Fi, and a 62-key keyboard. It was bulky and heavy and not really suitable as a phone.
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Sep 17, 2017 14:29
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Three-Phase posted:This rules. Old barrel organ playing "Smooth Criminal" Super pro-click
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Sep 17, 2017 17:35
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Super pro-click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHLbaOLWjpc e: unrelated: my local electronics store now has a turntable display as well as classic The Cure albums on vinyl and I'm like, drat, even amazon doesn't target me this accurately.
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Sep 17, 2017 17:54
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Mr.Radar posted:Earlier today I discovered that someone had uploaded the whole series of the 90s Are You Afraid of the Dark? horror anthology show to the Internet Archive so I've been rewatching some of the episodes I vaguely remembered. One of them is "The Tale of the Phone Police". While watching the episode I couldn't help but think how many of the plot points in it wouldn't make sense to younger people today. PHONE COPS 
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Sep 17, 2017 19:07
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evobatman posted:HTC Desire Z, from the days when HTC was the hottest company in the world when it came to smartphones. The build quality on this thing, especially the hinge mechanism, was incredible. Known Lecher posted:T-Mobile in the US released their own branded version of that called the T-Mobile G2 and I had one. It's like 5-6 years since I stopped using it and I still haven't owned a smartphone that's as good. I used that thing solid from the end of 2010 right up until about last year maybe, when T-Mobile literally discontinued 4G in favor of 4G-LTE and the phone became a brick. That phone was so good and my clumsy rear end dropped it on concrete at least a few times and it never looked worse for wear. It was even the perfect size too. Miss that keyboard and no-look typing.
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Sep 17, 2017 22:31
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Krispy Kareem posted:I've been reading David Sedaris's Theft by Finding, which is 20 years of his diary entries and the sheer amount of power the phone company had over people's lives was astounding. Years of entries where he was perpetually $80 in arrears and getting his phone shut off, which would grind his life to a halt. I mean, it's that way now in that most people couldn't work or socialize without a mobile phone, but the power dynamics have shifted. I read a book by the guy who wrote the 1970s sitcom Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em. He had no phone, so he would wait in a phone box for the BBC to call him. Understandably, the BBC tired of this pretty quickly and told him to get his own phone. The post office (who ran the phones) said no problem, we'll put you on the waiting list. You should get your phone in about six months. Hard to even imagine that in an age where you can get a phone from the supermarket and be talking on it five minutes later.
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Sep 18, 2017 02:40
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Wilford Cutlery posted:PHONE COPS That and the "I swear I thought turkeys could fly" are the best episodes
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Sep 18, 2017 02:46
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Mister Kingdom posted:Do modern day programmers still uses flowcharts? I don't know how "modern" I am - I'm not using MongoDB or even the cloud - but earlier this decade I was doing something similar: UML state machines that looked a bit like flowcharts because there were lots of diamonds representing conditions. If we had invested money in tools this probably could have been automatically converted into code, but I have heard that some of those tools like Rational Rose can be pretty painful to use in real projects (I've only ever played with them).I've done similar stuff with turning state machine diagrams into VHDL code for FPGAs. I guess those sorts of diagrams only look a bit like flowcharts - you don't have lots of special symbols for input, output, etc. I wouldn't even be able to tell you what any of those symbols were without looking them up. I do have an official IBM flowcharting template though No, I don't mean like a PowerPoint template, I mean a piece of plastic with holes in it. Do kids these days even know what they are?
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Sep 18, 2017 04:48
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ishikabibble posted:I used that thing solid from the end of 2010 right up until about last year maybe, when T-Mobile literally discontinued 4G in favor of 4G-LTE and the phone became a brick. The one I had I got from work. A guy had left it out on the balcony while vacationing in Spain, so it was pretty much just a solid lump of rust. I took it apart and cleaned it up, and used it on and off for a couple of years. I used to be into modding phones and installing new roms, but this model was more complicated than others to do it on. I could never figure it out, otherwise it would probably have been with me for a very long time. I had an extremely moddable HTC HD2 for years, which ended up with Windows Phone 7.8 before people started swapping in used iPhones at work, and I grabbed one of those.
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Sep 18, 2017 08:43
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Buttcoin purse posted:I don't know how "modern" I am - I'm not using MongoDB or even the cloud Yeah, it's a tool to help with being a better rapper, right?
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Sep 18, 2017 08:54
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Samizdata posted:Yeah, it's a tool to help with being a better rapper, right? idgi  
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Sep 18, 2017 09:53
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I am going to assume you are not pulling my leg and mention that when a rapper seems to be smoothly rapping and improvising quickly and effectively, you might say their flow is strong, or they have mad flow or something like that.
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Sep 18, 2017 10:24
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Ah.
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Sep 18, 2017 18:43
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Known Lecher posted:T-Mobile in the US released their own branded version of that called the T-Mobile G2 and I had one. It's like 5-6 years since I stopped using it and I still haven't owned a smartphone that's as good. This was my first android phone. I accidentally dropped it from a second story apartment balcony onto gravel. Not a single scratch!
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Sep 18, 2017 19:07
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Why does no one make phones like that anymore. I'd rather have good battery life and nokium-nintendium alloy than a slightly faster cpu and higher resolution screen.
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Sep 19, 2017 04:38
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Keiya posted:Why does no one make phones like that anymore. I'd rather have good battery life and nokium-nintendium alloy than a slightly faster cpu and higher resolution screen.
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Sep 19, 2017 10:01
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Nobody makes one with a built-in keyboard nowadays and you can't reasonably add one, bluetooth stuff notwithstanding. It's a shame really, I loved the form factor and I'd bet nowadays you could make the top part super thin with an OLED screen too.evobatman posted:HTC Desire Z, from the days when HTC was the hottest company in the world when it came to smartphones. The build quality on this thing, especially the hinge mechanism, was incredible. 
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Sep 19, 2017 11:15
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Keiya posted:Why does no one make phones like that anymore. I'd rather have good battery life and nokium-nintendium alloy than a slightly faster cpu and higher resolution screen. There are rugged phones (Samsung makes some and I think companies like CAT do) and there are phones with great battery life (The Moto Z Play for example and I think Asus or Acer or someone do some special big battery phones). Getting both in one package is an it harder though. Of course the newest flagship phones from Apple and Samsung are as slim and as beautiful as possible without regard to battery life or drop survivability. Those aren't the only phones on the market though.
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Sep 19, 2017 11:33
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Every one of Dijkstra's opinions about anything related to programming and computer science.
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Sep 19, 2017 11:51
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Hey, that's still useful. It's like a movie reviewer who likes stuff you hate - you can use it to accurately judge things even if it's by negating everything they say.
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Sep 19, 2017 12:26
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